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1 Kings XIX, 18. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, 
all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal and every mouth 
which hath not kissed him. 

Isaiah X, 21. The remnant shall return, even the remnant of 
Jacob, unto the mighty God. 



THE TWELFTH ANNUAL SERMON OF THE NEW 
ENGLAND SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 
PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF SAINT JOHN 
THE DIVINE ON FOREFATHERS' SUNDAY, 
DECEMBER I7th, 1911, BY THE VERY REVEREND 
WILLIAM M. GROSVENOR, D. D. 



5068 /'(> 



^be puritan IRemnant. 



I Kings XIX, 18. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, 
all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal and every mouth 
which hath not kissed him. 

Isaiah X, 21. The remnant shall return, even the remnant of 
Jacob, unto the mighty God. 



THE TWELFTH ANNUAL SERMON OF THE NEW 
ENGLAND SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 
PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF SAINT JOHN 
THE DIVINE ON FOREFATHERS' SUNDAY, 
DECEMBER I7th, 1911, BY THE VERY REVEREND 
WILLIAM M. GROSVENOR, D. D. 



. a ti 









XEbe (puritan IRemnant 



I Kings XIX, 18. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, 
all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal and every mouth 
which hath not kissed him. 

Isaiah X, 21. The remnant shall return, even the remnant of 
Jacob, unto the mighty God. 



No one can possibly think of the Pilgrim 
Fathers and the Puritans of New England with- 
out entering immediately into the spirit of the 
Hebrew prophets. Puritanism was a renascence 
of Judaism and the one distinguishing note of 
those ancient seers was their vision of the rem- 
nant. They saw evils coming in like a flood, but 
there was always the rainbow of hope, one bright 
sun beam flashing through the clouds ; the nation 
will be utterly wasted, even destroyed, until only 
a tenth is left, that tenth will be devoured, 
chastisement after chastisement will sift the 
people, until the nation will be like a terebinth 
tree stripped of its leaves, its branches lopped 
off, and even the stump cut down close to the 



ground ; yet out of that seemingly dead stock a 
young shoot shall spring forth, the holy seed is 
alive within it, and is the substance thereof. 
There shall come forth a shoot out of the stem of 
Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots 
and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, 
the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit 
of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and 
the fear of the Lord and shall make him of quick 
understanding in the fear of the Lord ; and he 
shall not judge according to the outward appear- 
ance nor as having respect unto the persons of 
men, nor for reward, but with righteousness shall 
he judge the poor and pass sentence with equity 
in defence of the rights of humble people. Isaiah 
has hope even though no one be left but his own 
son Shear-jashub so named because the words 
mean " The Remnant returns ". A highway will 
be opened, Immanuel will lead the nation back. 

The day has come for us here in America to 
think very seriously concerning the remnant. 
We are overwhelmed by an immense immigration 
and we must study once more the duties of the 
minority. If this sermon does nothing else, I 
trust it will lead you to read again Matthew 
Arnold's essay on Numbers. The Athens of 



Eubulus was a most luxurious democracy. Plato 
confessed tliat Athens was doomed, its inde- 
pendence was soon to be taken away from it, its 
salvation depended upon tlie righteous minority. 
Plato however was hopeless, the minority was 
helpless. The only thing that Plato can suggest 
is for the righteous to stand aside under a wall 
and let the storm of dust and the hurricane of 
driving wind sweep past. Each righteous man 
might as well keep still, mind his own business 
and save his own soul out of the wreck. But 
the remnant of the Hebrew prophets are sum- 
moned to valiant service. Immanuel is the 
Saviour and they who follow him must restore 
the Nation. The seven thousand left in Israel 
must rally around Elijah and rescue the true wor- 
ship. The remnant will not return as a poor 
band of ragged and starving refugees, but as a 
corps of brave soldiers ready for battle. In the 
righteous remnant lies all hope. 

If the Pilgrim Fathers were a righteous rem- 
nant, we their sons are certainly a minority. We 
are scattered throughout the land. We have lost 
control of New England. Faneuil Hall is in an 
Irish city. Many beautiful colonial dwellings 
under the elms are crowded with Slavs and 



Poles and Italians and French Canadians. The 
Roman Catholic spire overshadows the Meeting 
House. More than that, the Anglo- Saxon is now 
a minority ; only a remnant is left of the sons of 
the Dutch and the Cavalier. 

This organization of the New England Society 
is of immense value, not that it may boast of the 
past, but that by vivid remembrance of who and 
what we are, we may gain new courage to re-assert 
our place in the life of this growing democracy. 
All the Anglo-Saxons and all who wish to join 
them must unite in the preservation of those 
fundamental principles of life which are essential 
to the integrity of the Nation. If we will unite 
in any great cause, I believe nothing can resist us. 
Have we any one great cause to-day ? Yes we 
have. And it is the same cause that drove our 
fathers across the sea ; it is the right of every man 
to be himself, to live his own life as a freeman in 
the presence of Almighty God and the whole 
world. 

But you say to me that individualism has done 
its work, its age is past. It stood for competition 
and selfishness. Its motto is each man for him- 
self. To-day we are living in a higher atmosphere, 
and we possess a nobler spirit. We are thinking 



of human brotherhood, of co-operation, of social 
responsibility, of the common good of the masses 
and the common rights of the whole people. The 
democratic spiiit is spreading. Socialism is grow- 
ing. Manhood suffrage is inevitable and Woman's 
suffrage is approaching. The final court of judg- 
ment is the majority of a free democracy, the 
consent of the governed. The one cure for the 
ills of freedom is more freedom. All we can do 
is to believe in the people, educate them, and trust 
them. Majorities must rule. The government of 
a self-righteous and superior remnant is a thing of 
the past. 

We have had all sorts of government in the his- 
tory of the past. We have had the patriarchal, 
the monarchy, the feudal system. We have had 
autocratic monarchy and constitutional monarchy. 
In ancient and modern times we have had aristoc- 
racies, and oligarchies, and every form of repub- 
lic with and without constitutions, with pluto- 
cracies and committees and communes and parlia- 
ments. But the great movement of democracy 
has gone slowly forward. The problems of our 
modern life are too complex to be solved by in- 
dividualism. Socialism is a new science dealing 
with new problems, or with old problems under 



6 

new conditions. The crowd, the mass, the people 
have always been a part of human society. Feu- 
dalism recognized them in a ^patriarchal fashion, 
the feudal lord caring for his retainers. At the 
Reformation the individual came forth from the 
crowd and stood alone in the presence of God 
claiming his right to the possession of his own 
soul. At the French Revolution the crowd itself 
emerged, became conscious of itself and of its 
solidarity and claimed in thunderous but incoher- 
ent voice the rights of the people to their corpo- 
rate soul. The older word was spoken : Behold 
Lord I am here and the children whom thou hast 
given me. Then came the prophetic word, Lord 
here am I send me, and then in Jesus Christ all 
of us are brothers, " Now, therefore, we are all 
here present before God." 

And through all these movements the indiv- 
idual with his personal rights, his passion to be 
himself, his conscience and will, has persisted. All 
through the past the righteous have been forever 
needed, and I do not for a single moment believe that 
any form of government, be it pure democracy or 
socialism will ever be strong enough to suppress 
or destroy the strong man. The democracy of 
the future will demand more and more equality 



before law, with equality of opportunity. The 
whole brotherhood will live and let live, making 
juster laws. But nothing under Heaven can de- 
stroy personality. Socialism cannot do it, and 
socialism rightly understood does not seek to do 
it. Labor unions, corporations, trade conditions 
cannot do it, and if any scheme of government 
tries to do it, it will split upon that rock. 

Have you ever read Prof. William James' de- 
scription of Chautauqua ? That ideal place where 
everything is perfect, and how he enjoyed it for 
a while, and then rushed out of it in revolt, 
when it became as vapid and suffocating and 
uninteresting as being imprisoned iti a perfume 
laden hothouse. Human nature wants risks and 
dangers, and wild adventures. It hates perpet- 
ual similarity and stupid routine. A perfect 
state, an ideal city, a Utopia, the condition that 
democracy or socialism is supposed to bring, will 
last about as long as everything else that is 
human. It will last until people get bored with 
it or until they use it up. A building covered 
with statues of sentimental star-gazing angels ap- 
peals to no one, but it is another thing altogether 
to be surrounded with statues of the Saints who 
were tortured, mocked, scourged, imprisoned. 



8 

stoned, torn asunder, men who never lived 
either in Chautauqua or Utopia, but who wan- 
dered in deserts and mountains and dens and 
caves of the earth, men who took a little ship 
across a wild sea and faced savages upon a rocky 
coast ; followers not of a garlanded God, but of 
the crucified Master of the World. 

A thousand years from now when the race has 
been educated, and Christ so merciful and so 
valiant really rules the world, the voice of the 
people will be the voice of God, but meanwhile 
the majority is sometimes right and sometimes 
wrong. Human nature is full of passion, uncon- 
trolled emotions, hot-headed. Out of French 
Revolutions, that seek freedom, come Napoleons 
and Empires. Why is it that we have so little 
respect for politicians? To serve the state is the 
noblest thing a man can do and yet we sneer at it 
and despise it. It is caused by our truckling for 
votes, by the fear of the majority, by listening to 
the sound that comes along the ground and out of 
the ground and never rises above the ground. It 
is caused by our subserviency to party. Coke of 
Norfolk once said of the Parliament of his day 
that if " Ministers were to hold up a hat in the 
house and declare it to be a green bag, up would 



come a procession of placemen and vote that it was 
a bag and not a hat". How the very name poli- 
tician signifies to us trickery and evasion and 
cajolery and lying and slandering and utter un- 
trustworthiness. In the long history of politics I 
have sometimes thought that Macchiavelli was as 
honest as any of them, for he proclaimed himself 
a rascal and reduced his rascality to a science. 
How can we really respect a body of men who 
will vote for such preposterous pensions, and 
reverently hide their plunder under the blood- 
stained flags of a war of forty years ago ? How 
can werespectthe judgment of the majority, when 
we remember how a great party flung itself at the 
feet of an untried and unknown man who made 
an eloquent speech about a cross of gold. 

But the serious thing is this, whether the Sons 
of New England really care about the independ- 
ence and the personal freedom in which their 
forefathers gloried. Some of us are smothered 
with luxury. All we want is to get behind the 
wall and escape the hurricane of flying dust. 
Thank God then that there are some of us who do 
care for a few things, for which we "will fight. 
We will still fight for the right to conduct our 
own personal affairs and our honest and legiti- 



10 

mate business according to our conscience and not 
according to the dictation of trusts and labor 
unions. We must fight for our right to work for 
whom we please and for as much as we can get, 
without being murdered. We must fight for the 
Constitution with its checks and balances, the 
bulwark of our freedom. We must fight to keep 
Church and State forever separated. We must 
fight for our public schools against the machina- 
tions of an Italian hierarchy that is today en- 
deavoring to undermine and destroy them. We 
must fight for Christian marriage and the sancti- 
ties and unities of our homes. We must fight 
for toleration, for the weak against the strong, 
for simple honesty, for the Ten Commandments. 
We must fight for straight Anglo-Saxon thinking 
and bold bluff honest action. We must fight to 
be ourselves in the midst of the false standards 
and the confusing moralities of our social and 
business life. We must learn to liold our own in 
the teeth of fierce passions, and to rouse ourselves 
•from the enervating atmosphere of weak com- 
plaisance. We must get higher standards for our 
conscience, with a will of iron and a heart alert 
and strong and free. We must meet our crisis in 
life as Luther met his, " Here stand I, I can none 



11 

other." We can fight alone or together. A 
single man alone who cannot be cajoled, a 
splendid remnant that cannot be dismayed, 

O Sons of New England, I pray you forget your 
money-making for a while. The love of money 
is a deadly drug, a vapor that poisons and kills 
the finer impulses of the soul. The glory of New 
England is it idealism. Before it is too late and 
the hordes of Europe and Asia have engulfed us, 
let us arise and fight, not with dreadnoughts, but 
for Puritan ideals and Puritan morals, for Anglo- 
Saxon freedom and Anglo-Saxon discipline, for 
Almighty God who is still for us, King of Kings 
and Lord of Lords, for Christ who sat alone upon 
the hill and wept over Jerusalem which killest 
the prophets, the Emanuel who was crucified 
rather than deny the truth, the Messiah whose 
word is righteousness, whose law is love and 
whose service is perfect freedom. 



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